reading of Microfilm: The Rise, Fall, and New Life of Microfilm Collections

Microfilm: The Rise, Fall, and New Life
of Microfilm Collections

Brewster Kahle, Digital Librarian and Founder of the Internet Archive

With substantial help from Rick Prelinger, Professor UCSC, and Founder of the Prelinger Library
December 14, 2020

the club

| was taught how to use the library with my 7th-grade social studies class. One key tool was the
Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature — a long row of reference books issued once a year. If
you wanted to do a report on McCarthyism or tobacco advertising, you could pull the volume for
a year and find lists of magazine and newspaper articles published that were relevant to that
subject. My school library had The New York Times and other magazines, but not on paper.
They were on microfilm.

Holding a slip of paper with a date and page number, | went to the microfilm drawers and pulled
out a little square box that might contain a full year of a periodical. | took it to a large contraption
on top of a desk that stood 3 feet tall. Out of the box | took a three-inch reel of film, threaded it
under a lens and onto a takeup reel. After flipping a toggle switch, a light shone from under the
35mm film, projecting an image onto the machine’s white screen. On this 2-foot by 3-foot
screen, the newspaper came to life. | rolled through page after page until | found the date and
the page for the article | was looking for. Finding the news of the day from decades before was
like walking into a time machine. It was magic.

Reading pages on a microfilm screen wasn’t as pleasurable as reading a book, but the worlds
that were opened to me and those of my generation were not available to most people before
microfilm was invented, or after it went out of fashion, for that matter. Microfilm was a brilliant
approach to try to bring universal access to all knowledge, and while it may be hard to imagine
now, it was cutting-edge technology that transformed its time.

Memex from the Atlantic article (1945) by
Vannevar Bush.

In Vannevar Bush’s famous 1945 Atlantic magazine article “As We May Think,” he described his
dream for a machine that would leverage knowledge to make everyone smarter. The size of a
large desk, his “Memex” device contained the entire Library of Congress, all on microfilm. The
desk held a machine to locate any document and find any linked document. His grand vision
was enabled by the most advanced technology of its time: Microfilm.

This is the story of the rise and fall of microfilm and the new life
for microfilm collections

The dream of using motion-picture film stock to take photographs of document pages was
pioneered and promoted by a brilliant American named Robert C. Binkley. Beginning in the late

1920s, he tested, wrote about and championed microfilm, not only as a means of making copies
for preservation, but for distributed access to documents as well. Binkley saw the potential for
democratization of knowledge and the positive impact that distributed learning might have on
society. He advocated for research and scholarship that took place outside of university walls;
for citizen-led collecting and preservation of historical documents; and for microfilm as a means
of publishing books in small quantities, especially academic monographs that might not be
profitable for the publishing trade. His writing is replete with visions of technology as a means to
solve the age-old problems of scholarly publishing and as a means of increasing the historical
understanding of the population as a whole. If he had lived to see the early Internet, he might
have viewed it as validation of the ideas he expressed in the 1930s.

But the rise of microfilm as a commercial business that changed the nature of libraries is
associated with a single name: Eugene Power, and his company University Microfilms
Incorporated.

Eugene Power was a salesman in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the 1930s, and he had an idea. What
if you could publish documents in small editions? This was decades before Xerox machines,
digital scanners, or computer printers. To copy something at that time meant retyping it (perhaps
using cumbersome carbon paper), or laying it out again so that it could be printed. Print layout
and page composition, even with type set by machines such as the Linotype, was an expensive
process, and its cost could only be justified by printing hundreds of copies. His idea was a
radical breakthrough — that you could cost-effectively make an edition of one. He fixed on
microphotography — a process that had been proposed in the first decade of the 20th century
and used for special purposes — and turned it into a business.

Microfilm took its inspiration from motion-picture film. But instead of shooting a scene at 24
frames per second, microfilm cameras photographed a page or two pages in a single frame.
With microfilm, you could shoot a single frame and reproduce a whole page, albeit onto film that
would require a special reading machine.

We may think of tiny cameras taking pictures as World War 2 spycraft, but Eugene Power saw
different potentials for this technology. In his autobiography, he describes the excitement of
flying on a cargo plane into England, then under German bombing, in order to take photographs
of priceless documents in key English libraries so as to make sure they would be preserved if
the originals were destroyed during the war. Microfilm was also used to save precious cargo
space on airplanes: soldiers’ letters home were microfilmed, the film transported back to the
United States and then enlarged and printed on special paper and sent through the postal
system as “V-Mail.” The National Institute of Health used microfilm during World War II for
preservation but also for distributing articles to remote doctors.

After the war ended, Power started a business photographing publications and reproducing
them in small quantities. He concentrated on old books of scholarly interest, theses and
dissertations, and old magazines and newspapers. His salesmanship convinced libraries to buy
the same periodicals twice — first in paper, and then when the paper was taking up too much

space, and they wanted a smaller version, he would sell them the same periodical again on
microfilm. Later, some microfilm was replaced by microfiche: 4 x 6 inch transparent films that
held many small images that were cheaper to create and easier to access quickly.

During World War 2, University Microfilms, employing 15 people and a total of over 1600 people
through 1988, transformed small libraries into holders of collections that only the largest libraries
could dream of. They democratized access to knowledge, bringing primary materials and
contemporaneous secondary records directly to millions of people through their local libraries or
institutions.

By looking at the resulting microfilm, it appears that Powers’s company mostly subscribed to
periodicals, but also borrowed from libraries and photographed the pages at their plant in Ann
Arbor, Michigan. Some magazines and newspapers were bound by the libraries and
photographed as bound volumes, but many were loose issues. The camera master and print
master copies of the microfilm were stored in a vault. The contracts with publishers were simple
affairs: University Microfilms had exclusive use of the micrographic forms of the periodical, and,
in return, the publisher would get 10% of the revenue of University Microfilms’s earnings from
selling films to libraries. As the business and the number of periodicals grew, University
Microfilms often subscribed to magazines that would be added to their collection to be
photographed.

Power became interested in Xerography as a means of printing from microfilm. Xerox
developed the Copyflo process for fast, automated Xeroprinting in 1955, and the association
between University Microfilms and Xerox led to an acquisition by Xerox Corporation in 1962 for
almost eight million dollars. At that time, Xerox forced their employees to retire at the age of 60,
but for companies they acquired they let employees stay until they were 65. In his
autobiography, Eugene Power expresses his unhappiness at being forced out of the business
he founded in 1970.

This was the beginning of the fall of microfilm.

The Fall: Corporations in Microfilm

Fortunately, after Xerox Corporation forced Eugene Power out of his company, he stayed active
in new businesses (including a hotel in his hometown of Traverse City, Michigan that is still in
operation) and established a philanthropic foundation that supported a museum in Ann Arbor
and many arts and music events. Unfortunately, his departure was not good news for the
collections he had put on microfilm.

Xerox hoped that promoting microfilm might be a good way to sell microfilm readers. Their
vision for the corporation seemed to change as the name went through four permutations. And
in 1985 the camera and equipment manufacturer Bell & Howell bought UMI, as it was then

called. UMI entered the CD-ROM business, publishing periodical indexes and other databases,
and started using the ProQuest name for their database products. While the microfilm
collections kept growing and customers kept buying (U.S. college and university libraries held
5.2 million reels in 1968, doubling to 10 million by 1972)', the idea of democratizing access and
applying new technologies to publish small editions stalled. Many databases, both indexes and
the publications they indexed, moved into digital form. Two large online database companies
aggregated many newspaper, periodical and index collections and made them available first by
dialup and the dedicated circuits. ProQuest (the name the company took from 2001) and its
microfilm business soldiered on, as most periodicals and theses were not considered
economically valuable enough to get the gold-star treatment of being retyped into mainframe
databases. But even as thousands of periodical titles, millions of issues, and hundreds of
millions of pages of the world’s periodicals existed only on microfilm and in some library
repositories, microfilm’s days were numbered, and the company did not invest in bringing them
digital.

Even as it moved towards obsolescence, microfilm was still heralded as a great preservation
format. An often repeated estimation was that carefully cared-for microfilm reels would not
deteriorate for approximately five hundred years. Because of this, microfilming is still going on at
such institutions as the Library of Congress. But deterioration was not the reason these cultural
artifacts be lost. The danger came from a different direction.

A recent comic describing longevity, featuring books and microfilm as long lasting:

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ITS UNSETTUNG To REALIZE HOW QUICKLY DIGITAL RESOURCES
CAN DISAPPEAR WITHOUT ONGOING WORK To MAINTAIN THEM.

PERMANENT LINK TO THIS COMIC: HTTPS://XKCD.COM/1909/
IMAGE URL (FOR HOTLINKING/EMBEDDING): HTTPS://IMGS.XKCD.COM/COMICS/DIGITAL_RESOURCE_LIFESPAN.PNG

https://xkcd.com/1909/

While University Microfilms was always a very commercial company with a salesman at its
head, it undertook its work with care and was deeply committed to its mission. ProQuest is now
owned by a private equity firm which licenses a number of information products targeting the

' Alice Harrison Bahr, “Microforms: The Librarians’ View, 1978-79,” White Plains, N.Y.: Knowledge
Industry Publications, 1978, p.5.

library market. As digital technologies caused microfilm’s profit margin to wane, its days were
numbered. In 2005, ProQuest spun off the microfilm business to National Archive Publishing
Company. | would have thought that ProQuest would have digitized the microfilm and added it
to its databases sold to libraries, but | was assured by Jeff Moyer, one of National Archive’s
principals, that the vast majority of the microfilm serials collection had never been digitized from
the microfilm or rephotographed from the original periodicals. Had any particular title been
profitable enough, ProQuest would have tried to renegotiate the licenses and then digitized from
the original journal.

Jeff Moyer and his partner Joe Mills kept the microfilm business going and growing for years,
until it didn’t. He said it generated 8 million dollars in revenue per year making microfilm and
microfiche and sending them out to libraries. When libraries stopped buying around 2017, Jeff
was in trouble, as he’d personally guaranteed bank loans to his business. Bankruptcy could ruin
him.

Convinced that he had a major asset in the microfilm, perhaps worth tens of millions of dollars,
he shopped it to libraries and commercial publishers in 2017.

Microfilm Collections Saved

At a conference held at the Boston Public Library in about 2006, two competing approaches to
book digitization were discussed. At that time, Google was sponsoring digitization of library
books, while Internet Archive took a community approach called the Open Content Alliance.
Either way, books were thought to be a key to the Web’s future. | gave a speech about
Universal Access to All Knowledge and how it was possible to digitize and make available
books, music, and video — “all the published works of humankind” in a cost-effective way, and
what a world it would be.

At the reception, a quiet, elderly librarian from MIT said to me “Mr. Kahle, | have heard almost
exactly your talk before, a long time ago. And the talk was about microfilm.” | thanked her and it
stuck with me. | had used microfilm in school as | mentioned and even made a microfilmed copy
of a letter at MIT’s micrographics office and put the letter under a stamp on a postcard as a form
of mail art to a friend. Previously I’d even bought a reel of microfilm on then-new Ebay, and
bargained OCLC down to 25 cents a page to have it digitized. My take then was that it was too
expensive, and we might as well digitize from paper. But when this kind librarian mentioned
microfilm again, and in the context of the grand idea, the same grand idea | was attempting —
Universal Access to All Knowledge — we decided to try again.

There had been grand projects to create microfilm, including the Brittle Books program,
sponsored over many years by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which microfilmed
over a million disintegrating books that were disintegrating. The Library of Congress to this day,
or at least recently, still microfilms at a large scale for preservation.

Inspired by the possibility of mass digitization, the Internet Archive bought ten
high-speedmicrofilm scanners for half a million dollars and then leveraged Obama stimulus
money during the Great Recession of 2009 to hire 20 newly unemployed San Francisco parents
to start mass digitization of microfilm. The problem turned out to be finding libraries that would
lend us microfilm to digitize even at no cost to the libraries. Libraries had the film but we found
only one library willing to participate: the Allen County Public Library, of Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Allen County Public Library has a large collection of materials for genealogists. They hold many
family histories, subscribe to databases, and also hold microfilm of all the handwritten census
records, passenger ship records, Indian and military records. And best of all, they would lend
them to us. The LDS Church (Mormon) also has a vast vault of microfilmed church records in
Granite Mountain, Utah, that | had the pleasure of seeing at one time, but they were doing their
own digitization. | saw how the Mormons digitized their microfilm and they did it so much faster
than we did, so | came back to California and spent three months improving our microfilm
scanning. And the Internet Archive digitized 50 million pages from microfilm and put them on the
web for free public access. This made us heroes to genealogists.

But then we had trouble finding other libraries that would lend us more microfilm, and so the
project stopped.

Years passed, and we were approached by Jeff Moyer about his trove of microfilmed
periodicals-- the famous UMI collection. An Archive staff member visited Ann Arbor to survey
the opportunity and we were excited.

Unfortunately, we didn't have the kind of money that Jeff Moyer wanted for the microfilm
collection. | appealed to many foundations and wealthy individuals to try to help keep this
microfilm from who knows what fate. But | couldn't raise the money. It turned out there weren't
other takers that could cover the bank debt, so the bank declared foreclosure and took over the
asset. So then fifteen thousand periodicals titles that document the 20th century — were in a
bank foreclosure auction.

There were two copies, and sometimes a third, in the vaults — the camera masters, the print
masters, and sometimes a 16mm or microfiche version. | made an offer for the print masters of
the full collection and assured Jeff that one way or another | would try to make sure he did not
lose his house. | was delighted, but surprised, that we were the top bidder in a silent auction,
and I'm not sure there were any other bidders. So, for half a million dollars we had four weeks to
show up and pack up a huge collection of microfilm so that it could be preserved.

We scurried to assemble a team to converge in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The building that was
once Eugene Power's dream was deteriorating — buckling asphalt, stripped gutters, and broken
windows. The one part of that whole campus that was still well maintained and protected was
the vault.

But even after packing and moving four truckloads of microfilm canisters to the Physical Archive
in California, there was another step in the decline of the collection and its new bank owner.

As it turned out, the bank didn't accept any offer for the camera masters and the other
miscellaneous archives that were in the vault. They asked us what we would offer. | explained
that they should put the camera masters in a different location, perhaps the Library of Congress,
and they asked again for an offer. In case they really didn't have another offer, | put in a low-ball
bid to make sure that it wouldn't get thrown away or recycled for the silver content in the film.

To my surprise and disappointment, we were the winner again. To me this meant that not only
was the corporate system that profits off of libraries was unwilling to protect major cultural
collection, but the traditional library system was unwilling as well. On the other hand, we got
another four truckloads of canisters and what turned out to be fantastic troves of other microfilm
collections including George Washington’s letters.

Uno i

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April 15, 1952 }
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https://archive.org/details/sim_guernsey-breeders-journal_ 1952-04-15 84 8/mode/2up

Let me say a bit about the serials and microfilm collection assembled by Eugene Power and
University Microfilms, Inc. The collection holds 15,000 different periodicals spanning centuries
— weeklies, monthlies, quarterlies, annuals. There are popular magazines, trade magazines,
academic journals. It contains Frederick Douglass's anti-slavery newspaper from before the Civil
War, the Freedmen's Record, a post-Civil War magazine for formerly enslaved people, The
Black Panther newspaper from 1968 to 1980, many magazines from the 1960s, a full run of
Billboard magazine from 1894 to 2016, even American Laundry Digest and one hundred years
of the Guernsey Breeders Journal. | can't stop looking at these magazines as they are digitized.
The advertisements are fantastic and their graphic sensibilities are amazing. The quality of the
filming by University Microfilms was fabulous and vibrant and all the text is readable, even
though everything is in black and white.

It's hard to visualize what 400,000 publication-years and over 4 million issues and 300 million
pages is like. lt goes on and on and on. It reminds me of when | first went to the White Plains
Public Library City near the town | grew up in. The stacks seemed as long as the eye could see.
It felt infinite and exhilarating.

Microfilm Collections Get a New Life in the Digital Era

| got an urgent call from the new owner of Editor and Publisher magazine. He had recently
purchased that publication, and wanted all the back issues for his website. He had physical
copies, but the cost to digitize them commercially was much more than he could afford. So he
looked around for other copies, found that there was a microfilm version, and then he chased
down what happened to that microfilm version.

He talked of it as his microfilm and | had to gently correct him on that. | asked: “if we digitized
these, could we make these available on the open Internet?” And he said, “Yes, of course, how
much will it cost?” | said — “nothing, we'll do that for free”. He was ecstatic. And so we
prioritized the pallet containing Editor and Publisher magazine, and issue after issue after issue
came off of the microfilm scanners and through a long processing thread through optical
character recognition to make readable screen versions with downloadable PDFs covering 100
years. A friend of mine came over for lunch. She's the daughter of a local newspaper publisher
in the Bay Area and | told her about Editor and Publisher, and she said, “Let's look up my
father!” So we searched on Mort Levine and up came pages and articles listing her father's
accomplishments over the years. She was thrilled.

There are now 30 people working full-time to give these microfilm collections of periodicals a
new life on the Internet. I've been working to gear this up for the last year-and-a-half, and we
have just crossed over the 10% of the collection. We will speed up, but it is a huge job.

Let me speed through the steps and processes that it takes to bring this library back to life.

10

The six people worked in the vault for months, carefully cataloging every canister which was
place in labeled box on pallets that were then loaded onto trucks.

Each of these canisters contains film reels that are 35mm wide and up to 100 ft long, in a coil.
There are perhaps 10 or 15 reels inside a canister, so unlike a spool of film that takes up the
whole canister, a reel generally holds one year of one periodical. If a school wanted the
Saturday Evening Post from 1946, the company would pull a canister off the shelf, pull out one
of the print master reels, put iton a machine and optically print a new copy of that film onto
another piece of film, which would be wound up on a small 3-inch spool, put into a square box
and sent to the school. So each of these canisters held decades of a periodical and there were
many canisters — in fact, nearly 30,000 canisters just of the print masters. It's a little hard to
imagine how large this is. A library that would hold all of those printed periodicals would have
over 40 miles of shelving. These canisters in boxes in pallets in shipping containers inside
physical archives have been carefully catalogued and are being queued for scanning.

Next step is to scan the film at the best possible resolution both efficiently and cost effectively.
The Internet Archive experience with the genealogy collection helped, but this was many times
larger.

We looked into vendors who could do it for us and were quoted 8 to 10 million dollars to scan
the collection in two years. This was more money than we had and foundations and libraries
were still uninterested. And we wanted it done better than the vendors would have done it.
Maybe we could do it ourselves.

| called our friends at the Mormon Church and looked online, and indeed there was a new
technology. A company in Idaho called NextScan high-speed scanner, which costs $75,000,
scrolls the microfilm at high speed under a linear camera. A linear camera is different from the
camera in your phone in that it only has a single row of pixels, 8,000 or 16,000 pixels across, so
you have to roll the film underneath the camera. After you've scrolled the film under the camera,
you end up with an image that is 35mm high by 100 feet wide. The long image of the microfilm
is then broken up into chunks — it is best to think of it as one very wide jpeg image. Then there
is software that helps people analyze and figure out where the page images are located. This is
art that involves their software, high-speed computing and very skilled operators to frame all of
the page images on this gigantic image.

But before we could even use the scanner we had to take our canisters of reels and prepare
them. Most commercial microfilm scanning shops will mount one reel at a time, but we thought
we could do this more efficiently by splicing all of the reels in a canister together and then
scanning all at once. This turned out to speed the process considerably. Once the pages are
framed by the skilled operators, the software with the scanner is generally used to pull out the
page images, but we wanted to do something better than that. So we upload the big image and
the operators’ frames to the Internet Archive’s cluster of computers.

11

At this stage, we perform some corrections and image enhancements to deskew each page,
and we wrote programs to analyze each issue to find if the microfilm had faded from black to
gray. If so, we use automatic contrast enhancement to do a conservative but highly beneficial
job of bringing back the faded film. In this way, the magazine pages would be scanned at over
300 dots per inch and sometimes 600-- state of the art for digitization.

The operators also find the metadata for each issue to find the title and date. We thought this
would be easy, because if it were a weekly or monthly publication, you could automatically jump
to the next. Well, nothing is quite that easy, but it is doable by people who care.

Once we pull the images out and match them to metadata, we can process it as if it were a
scanned book-- including detecting what language and script the magazine is in, creating
readable text, feeding that into a search engine, creating rights-management versions for some
issues, and creating PDFs and versions for the print disabled. And the Internet Archive has had
20 years of experience scanning books and processing their images, so doing thousands of
issues a day keeps hundreds of computers busy.

Optical haracter recognition (OCR) can be used to make these documents usable in ways they
could not be in the past. You can search on a person's name and pull up all of the issues
mentioning that person, jump right to the right page and highlight it. You can analyze whole
periodical runs to see how word usage has changed. Searching Billboard magazine for the
words jazz, blues, hip-hop or various words for African Americans will show shifting word use
and cultural settings. We expect this type of analysis will be the most common and most
important use of these materials — using computers to understand media writ large. What
happens if you stand back and take a bigger view of what's going on? This is what we can do
now with these collections as they go onto the net.

But we're not there yet. What are these periodicals? Describing them to an Internet generation
turns out to not be easy. There are commercial databases that have about 50% of the titles in
their databases but those are owned by companies like ProQuest and the descriptions may be
copyrighted. Wikipedia has some of these but not very many. We are in discussions now with a
professor at a library school who will have students in her reference librarianship class write
descriptions for these periodicals. When | was in reference class in library school in the mid-80s,
we were given an assignment to do a book review for ALA Booklist. | am hoping that the library
school students will write these descriptions and also experience amazing periodicals that they
can carry into their professional lives.

And then there are the rights issues. The blind and dyslexic now have unfettered access
because of positive laws supporting their right to read. Based on a lawsuit that publishers lost,
computer programs written by digital humanities scholars are allowed to analyze these works in
toto as long as we do not let people read the materials-- in other words, computers are allowed
to read the copyrighted works, but not people in that ruling.

12

But we want to bring these periodicals to the Wikipedia generation. We want the equivalent of
my experience in junior high school being able to see the 20th century for what it was: the good,
the bad, and the twisted. We want Wikipedia contributors to be able to search and find the best
evidence for their articles in these periodicals and then link straight to the pages so that
Wikipedia readers who wanted to know more could click and open that periodical and see it
right away. We are still working on this.

We have had staff do research to find if the copyrights have been renewed, which is difficult
because the Copyright Office has not made the older files available online at all, much less in
searchable form. We’re now using that information to set some older periodicals free. There are
also laws that let libraries make some older materials available that are out of print, but what it
means for a 1936 issue of a periodical to be out of print is another difficult research project. For
the newer publications and newer issues, we are not quite sure what we will do. For some, like
Editor and Publisher, we have explicit permission, but securing that explicit permission is
extremely difficult and often impossible to even find parties to talk to. We may lend these
through interlibrary loan or controlled digital lending to the general public.

Why Should We Care About What Was Captured on Microfilm?

The materials that were put on microfilm will not make it to digital learners if it stays only on
microfilm. And what is on microfilm is valuable and useful.

| want the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature again-- | want it for my children that are
growing up with a library that, in many ways, is not as good as the ones | had the privilege to
grow up with. | want to make it so that anyone can read to understand subjects in the context of
their time. Internment camps for Japanese Americans. The Holocaust. Deceptive tobacco
advertising. Civil rights, abolition, women’s suffrage.

Eugene Power had a great idea. He spent his life building a collection, but then sold it, and it
was almost lost in corporate neglect. | want to see these collections reborn in a digital age, used
by a generation looking for reliable information with provenance. The ideas of a hundred years
ago, when appropriate, find fertile new ground in the minds of this generation, but only if we give
them the tools and access that | had the privilege to grow up with.

The dream of the Internet that | signed on to is Universal Access to All Knowledge. We can find
a path to have libraries again that are as complete and even more available as the American
public library system of Andrew Carnegie. Eugene Power had a vision and moved a technology
forward, and in this way has helped propel the Internet in ways that he might not have imagined.

But this will be difficult, expensive, and may come into conflict with formidable powers.

Preservation is a relay race. The baton is our cultural heritage which is on media that is falling
obsolete faster and faster. If the baton is dropped we can lose the creative works of millions of

13

people. Paper may last, but the vast majority of it will not be kept. Tens of university libraries
have been folded this year alone and hundreds are on the brink. Three of these libraries have
been preserved by the Internet Archive this year alone, but a lawsuit by 4 of the largest
commercial publishers is trying to stop this practice and destroy millions of digitized books.

Microfilm might last 500 years, but it is being thrown out in less than 50, as again, the Internet
Archive is receiving pallets of microfilm from libraries, and as described here, even the master
files of Eugene Power might not have been saved.

Computer files are even more fragile and need to be moved to new media every five years or
they will be irretrievably lost. File formats fall obsolete often within decades, and the cultural
materials written in those file formats are copyrighted for 95 years. The file formats themselves
are protected with patents and copyrights and are rarely published and so are difficult to reverse
engineer. A case in front of the US Supreme Court could make it illegal to even try to reverse
engineer the formats.

The Flash format by Macromedia then, through acquisition, Adobe, for example, once a popular
animation and game format for millions of Internet creators, has been unsupported for years and
will be officially unplayable on January 10th, 2021. This format is being brought back to life by
brave volunteer programmers working on a program called Ruffle, and the Internet Archive to
make historically important Flash animations available again. | call them brave because of the
legal uncertainty of all of this, and the increasing prevalence of lawsuits.

Rethinking the restrictions on information access and opening access can make it so many
more people can participate in learning, growing, and contributing to our cultural record.

The dream has always been there. Binkley, the microfilm pioneer, saw this when he wrote at
the end of his important tome in 1936, which well be spoken today of the dream of the Internet
and the World Wide Web:

“The broadening of the base of the pyramid of scholarly activity would contribute to the
whole field of education....

The present generation should not be surprised at the conclusion that a technological
revolution has in it the seeds of a cultural revolution. Such may indeed be true in this
instance. The cultural revival of the small-town as against the monopoly of the
metropolis, and the democratization and “deprofessionalisation" of scholarship are on
the horizon which seems to lie ahead. And these things, themselves, accord with other
elements of our societal and economic prospects — — notably the possible decline in the
centralization of population in cities and the development of a new leisure in the hands of
a well-educated people. The same technological innovations that promise to give aid to
the research worker in his cubicle may also lead the whole population toward
participation in a new cultural design.”

14

Manual On Methods of Reproducing Research Materials, Robert C. Binkley,
Page 201. 1936

In conclusion: Let's celebrate and protect the rebirth of microfilm collections! Long live microfilm
collections!

Further Readings:
Eugene Power's autobiography
Eugene Power Obituary

Manual On Methods of Reproducing Research Materials, Robert C. Binkley, 1936

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